Prologue
once upon a time

Though she never would have thought it possible, Hermione Granger found herself growing quite close to Fred and George Weasley after the war.

Ron had gone into Auror training, encouraged by Harry and Hermione when he doubted his skills as a duelist and strategist. Harry had foregone another lifetime of chasing Dark Wizards and had instead taken up an apprenticeship at Hogwarts, eventually to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts. Hermione had gone into the Department of Magical Education at the Ministry, working closely with the Department of Muggle Relations. Her job involved setting up and maintaining a program to integrate Muggleborn children into the Wizarding community before their entrance to Hogwarts.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione were the Golden Trio 'til the very end, but for the time being, their paths intertwined on some weekends and the occasional lunch date or to visit Hogwarts. But in the boys' absence, she wound up spending more and more time with Fred and George.

Hermione could blame it on needing to replace the seriousness of the previous years with the foolishness of the twins, but if she was being truthful with herself, she had to admit that she enjoyed being surrounded by the sheer beauty of magic that accompanied the twins' shenanigans. She was wrong back when she'd said their magic was useless. Anything that could bring a smile to anyone's face could never be useless. So she often found herself in the joke shop, sitting in the workroom and watching the twins work on new inventions, marveling at their creativity.

There was also the fact that she lived in Diagon Alley, less than a two minute walk from the shop. Surprisingly, there were a lot of benefits to living in close proximity to the twins. For one thing, Hermione always had company for lunch, as Fred and George would never pass up a meal, let alone one in her company. They ensured nothing in her refrigerator would ever go bad and were actually very good with replacing whatever they may have cleared through. Overall, whenever food was in the equation, they could be depended upon.

It also ensured that Hermione would never go to bed in a foul mood. She could always rely on the twins to cheer her up or at the very least dissipate her sadness or anger. Fred and George could still be annoying as hell, expertly pushing all her buttons in just the right combination. That was the key. They knew the buttons. So more often than not, they punched in the right code for a smile to follow the eye-roll that broke her gloomy expressions.

That was part of the reason why she came early to the joke shop on the 2nd of May, 2004. It was the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts, when they'd lost Tonks, Remus, Lavender, Colin, and nearly lost Fred himself. But it was also Victoire Weasley's birthday.

And so dressed in a white-and-lilac sundress and sandals, with Victoire's birthday present tucked under her arm, Hermione moseyed over to Weasley's Wizard Wheezes. She knew the melancholy hanging in the hair would be banished as soon as she crossed the threshold of the joke shop; it had no place at a birthday party for a two-year-old, after all.

She pushed open the front door to the brightly colored shop, and just as she'd predicted, the melancholy lifted. Before she could even try to search out one of the twins, the bell chimed overhead and all around her as well. Little orbs of white light gently swirled around her, leaving trails of multicolored streaks and sparkles in their wakes as they twirled around. They caressed her skin with soft, warm tingles that made her laugh and squirm to the gentle rhythms of the charm. Fred and George's heads peered out from behind the aisle of Skiving Snackboxes, grinning widely.

"There it is!" cried George, clapping his hands and pointing at Hermione's face as they strolled out to meet her.

"There's our seal of approval," said Fred, reaching out to poke the corner of Hermione's smile with a wry wink.

"See, we were a bit wary of this charm, Granger," said George, slinging an arm around her shoulder, "since we thought it might trigger some sort of PMS."

Hermione jerked and pinched her lips, stunned out of the awe of their gentle magic. "PMS?" she echoed slowly.

"Yeah. Poison Memory Syndrome," said Fred. "That Muggle disorder people get after they go through traumatic situations and get really bad flashbacks?"

Hermione bit back her smile. Poison Memory Syndrome. She supposed it made sense. "It's PTSD, boys—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."

George frowned and errantly drummed his fingers on her shoulder as he continued to hold onto her. "Then what's PMS?"

"Could've sworn we heard you say PMS at some point," added Fred, head cocked to the side.

"Pre-Menstrual Syndrome," answered Hermione. When the two grown men audibly swallowed, she rolled her eyes and saved them. "What was this charm for?"

"Just a little thing we did on a whim," said Fred. "Got the idea when Mum was decorating the Burrow for Victoire's party. Reckoned the baby girl would like the sparkles and lights when she walked into the kitchen to see her cake and blow out the candles."

"But we wanted to test it on you first," said George. "Just to see if it might be too intense for the other veterans, if you know what I mean."

Hermione nodded, still smiling softly at the bouncing, flittering lights. She could understand their hesitation about the harmless charm. One of the orbs danced close to her hand, and she quickly plucked it from the air. It hummed gently in her palm, and she could feel it seemingly multiply before shooting out from between her fingers.

"It's beautiful," she murmured admiringly. "I don't think you have a thing to worry about."

"Thank Merlin," breathed Fred. "The Whiz-bangs were our inspiration, see? But we wanted to make it baby-friendly—less gunpowder, less scary explosions, no dragons…" He ticked off his fingers.

"Kept the light show, eliminated dangerous mental repercussions," said George. "And instead of shooting spells to make them multiply, you just—poke one." He prodded one of the orbs with his fingertip, and it multiplied again, tumbling around Hermione in a swirl of pinks, purples, and periwinkles.

"Are you going to sell it?" asked Hermione.

"Nah, don't need to capitalize on everything," said George.

Fred came to her other side and snaked his arm around her waist as the twins walked her deeper into the ostentatiously-colored shop. The charm faded the further they got from the doorway, and while Hermione was sad to see the lights fad, the lightheartedness continued. "If that were the case, we would've long-since sold old—"

"—and new—"

"—embarrassing pictures of Ronniekins to Witch Weekly," finished Fred, fanning his hand as they crossed through a cloud of pastel-colored bubbles emitting from one of their products.

"Honestly, if given adequate excuse, we'd probably still do it now," said George.

Hermione shook her head and sighed. "You mean the one with the spatula?"

Fred and George's happy smiles widened evilly, and they chorused, "The one with the ice."

Oh, poor Ronald, she thought, laughing. "You two are going to be banned from his inevitable wedding, I'm sure of it."

"Which is just as likely as Ron himself being banned," said Fred.

"He certainly does have the impeccable timing of putting his foot in his mouth," said George, waving his wand to lock the front door and flip the sign to "closed."

"He did actually have a proclivity for gumming his toes when he was a baby," added Fred, tapping his lip thoughtfully. And then his expression brightened. George's face lit up almost a split second later, a clear sign of the strike of inspiration.

Hermione grinned as she watched their wide eyes and snapping fingers. They released her from their joint hold to put their heads together, a quick brainstorming session right in front of her.

"A variation of the Tongue-Ton Toffee—"

"—under the full lunar phase to ensure maximum mental effect—"

"—inevitable crumble of Wizarding society—"

Hermione's eyes widened and her grin was wiped clear. "What?!"

Fred and George turned to her with identical, wicked grins, and Hermione tried not to grimace. She'd learned to gauge the severity of their inventions from the way they smiled. Sheepish grins meant something that would be somehow detrimental to academics. Wide, happy grins meant an abundance of laughter at the minimum detriment of the victim. However, wicked grins meant products that were particularly diabolical.

"Foot Gummies," said George.

"All the effects of putting one's foot in the mouth, but without the dirt and the stench," said Fred.

"And that has what to do with the 'inevitable crumble of Wizarding society?'" asked Hermione through her teeth.

"The dissipation of relationships," said Fred.

"Offense taken at every corner," said George.

Fred sighed and stared off into the distance. "It'd be like Ron accidentally cloned himself and populated the community."

"Veto!" shrieked Hermione as the twins howled with laughter. "You gave me three veto's a year—this is number two! Veto!"

George leaned against the counter, his face red as he guffawed, while Fred led Hermione to the workroom, as she continued to yowl, "Inevitable crumble of Wizarding society indeed! I cannot under good conscience let you two—"

"We'll shelve the idea for now, eh?" offered Fred, still chortling as he towed her along.

"Fred, you will take that off the shelf and chuck it in the bin—do you understand the repercussions? The fallout—"

"Will be as majestic and destructive as your attempts to make soufflé."

Hermione spluttered indignantly and Fred took the opportunity to throw open the door to the workroom and nudge her inside, instigating a fresh burst of chimes and sparkles. Apparently they charmed all of their doorways.

Hermione, still fuming, walked down the short staircase to the long, rectangular workroom, brightly lit with lamps in close intervals on the ceiling, casting a cheerful glow on the dark wood. Five workbenches spanned the room, each with various experiments and inventions and contraption populating the surface. A supply shelf was built into the wall on the far end, filled with vials, tumblers, and jars of ingredients. The air was thick with the smell of potions and the fizzle of magic—much like a combination of the Potions and Charms classrooms.

She sat down on a stool by the workbench with bundles of colorful quills and three cauldrons. One emitted long, wispy tendrils of smoke, the second released a cool, rolling mist, and the third seemed fairly empty. Fred stood next to her stool and cancelled the protective stasis charm on the workbench.

"What're these?" asked Hermione, setting Victoire's present down on a free space and picking up a quill from a bundle.

"Joke quills," replied Fred as she twirled it between her fingers. "They'll write on your face if you fall asleep in class." He picked up one of the other quills, a longer, sturdier feather with a wide nub. "And this will keep on writing if you fall asleep in the middle of your notes, so even if you look half-dead, your hand will keep on going."

"Does it actually take legible notes once you fall asleep?"

Fred snorted. "Nope. As soon as your hand slackens, it shoots off, writing lyrics to wizard lullabies."

"Well, I suppose both deter students from slacking off," she said, nodding in approval. She picked up another quill, an ordinary-looking one. "And this?"

Fred grinned. "One of my favorites, actually." He picked up an innocuous purple quill and rested the tip against her lips. "Now, make your introductions, Granger, don't be rude."

Frowning warily, Hermione whispered, "Hello. My name is Hermione."

Fred then pulled it away and then chucked it across the room.

"Now, call for it," he said, smiling at her smugly.

Frown deepening, Hermione obeyed. "Q-Quill? Please come here!"

The purple quill suddenly rose up imposingly from where it'd fallen on the other side of the workroom. It quivered for a second before zipping over to Hermione. She managed to catch it before it embedded itself over her heart.

"Ingenious," squeaked Hermione sarcastically, setting it down carefully.

"Right?" agreed Fred proudly. "Call, and it'll come so you don't have to root through your bag and wind up pricking your finger or something. We figured that since the bloody thing is a feather, it should still be able to take to the skies, eh?"

"You know you run the very high risk of someone getting their eye poked out."

"Well, of course. All these quills may be respectable in your eyes, but they're still our products. Besides, it's better than it was before," said Fred. "At least you could stop it. First time we tested it out, it nearly went straight through my hand."

Hermione's jaw dropped, and she pushed herself away from the quills.

"Oh, don't worry!" He waggled his palm with a good-natured smile. "All healed. And we've significantly decreased the speed, sweetums, don't worry. The most it would've done was poked you a bit."

Still grimacing, Hermione eyed the quills. "Is that it?"

Fred hummed thoughtfully, sifting through the quills and then producing two sleek, slender quills, one black and the other white. "These have the potential to be extremely helpful, though we're still working out a few kinks. You can write secret messages with these. Each are specifically paired so it won't work with any other set. Write your message, and the words will fade into something else—innocuous messages or lyrics or an anecdote reminiscent of Ron's last encounter with vengeful garden gnomes. In order for the true message to be revealed, your partner and the partner quill need only draw a line through the decoy words."

"Fascinating," said Hermione, lighting up. "What are the kinks?"

"Well, some of the true words leak into the decoy, so the cover message is a bit incomprehensible and vice versa," said Fred, setting the quills back down and making his way around the workbench.

"What's in that other cauldron?" she asked, pointing at the almost empty cauldron down the other end of the table.

"Potion to stabilize the Patented Daydream Charms," answered Fred, packing the quills up into separate satchels. He winced. "Apparently in some packages, the daydream either starts turning into a nightmare or cuts off right when things start getting interesting. So we suffused the powder of the Daydream Charms with that potion. We've tested it ourselves about a hundred times, over and over—lost an entire bloody weekend on a pirate ship, sailing the high seas with a wench on one arm and a beautiful rival pirate on the other."

"And these?" asked Hermione, pointing at the two cauldrons casually.

Fred smirked, putting aside the quills and coming to stand in front of the cauldrons. "I'm proud of you, Herms—lasting long enough to ask about everything else on the table before your intended target?"

"Just tried to give you more time to come up with a viable explanation for what these are that won't require my other veto," she said shrewdly.

Fred clutched his chest dramatically. "I would never—"

Hermione scoffed.

"—make a product that is not even a bit morally questionable, Granger, you should know that already," he finished with a small bow and a devilish grin. "This, my dear unsubtle bookworm, are the keys to our little disappearing trick."

Hermione frowned at the two cauldrons. "Apparition doesn't need potio—"

"Hush your assumptions, lovely," he said, flourishing a fluffy quill at her face to interrupt her. "Do you remember when you brought us to your parents' house—"

"When you invited yourselves to my parents' house?"

"Now's not the time for semantics, darling. Your dad showed us those Muggle tricks, right?"

Hermione smiled broadly.

Richard Granger had floored the twins with his skills at magic tricks. The man had become a certifiable sleight-of-hand master after he'd promised Hermione he'd teach himself so they could exchange tips and pointers when she came back from her first year at Hogwarts. So when Richard pulled out the old deck of cards and asked the twins to pick a card, any card, Hermione had grinned widely and watched the show. The sight had perpetuated the guilt she continued to harbor for Obliviating and sending her parents away. But in his true unflappable way, Richard had smiled, pulled a coin from behind her ear, kissed her forehead, and continued to awe the twins by making a card float in midair.

She'd expected the wins to immediately incorporate the tricks to the joke shop, but the men shocked her once again by staunchly deciding to keep Muggle tricks Muggle. They hadn't wanted to mar their integrity and demean them with real wizardry.

Which made her suddenly leery of the two potions between herself and Fred.

"Did you…recreate something?" she asked, frowning at Fred's suddenly troubled expression.

His head tilted left and right as he hedged. "Well, Georgie and I got curious, you know? Muggles managed to make things disappear and reappear with Portkeys or Apparition—"

"Because of sleight of hand. I explained that already—"

"—but we wanted to see if we could do it. Try it out, you know?"

Hermione's grimace began to grow. "All right…"

"We could hardly incorporate Apparition since it's hard to make a non-sentient being determine and deliberate its destination. Short of giving an apple a brain with a three-concept loop, we may as well have chucked a banana from one end of the room to the other."

"So you had to create your own spell."

"Which was the rub, wasn't it?" Fred drummed his fingers on the table, eyes darting between the cauldrons and Hermione. "We'd have to register it at the Patents Office in the Ministry, which would mean public access to a spell that could be used for highly nefarious purposes, Granger."

Hermione sighed and crossed her arms on the table. "Yes, yes, I remember your vow to ensure your products couldn't be used by Dark wizards or at the very least be modified for evil."

"The wrong kind of evil. You were so close to having it verbatim, love," said Fred, winking.

"All right, so you made potions instead?" asked Hermione, steering the conversation back. "You'd still have to submit the patent to the Ministry."

"Not until we're out of the experimentation phase, sweetcheeks," sighed Fred, patting said cheek and making her slap his hand away. "We decided to bring it as close to the final stages as possible before we decided what to do with the final product."

Hermione sat up and peered into the cauldrons. "So are these the final stages?"

"No. This was just us trying to brainstorm a different avenue from spells or charms. Potions made the magic a little more stable and difficult to nefariously manipulate without throwing the entire thing off-kilter," answered Fred.

"How do they work?"

"The smoking one's for this cloth," he said, holding up a black cloth in his left hand before raising his right hand with a white cloth, "while the cold one's for this cloth."

He set the black cloth over the fluffy quill he'd waggled at her face and then dropped the white cloth into his newly-empty hand, revealing the quill nestled in the fabric.

Hermione bit her lip. "It's like the Vanishing Cabinet," she said. "From the Room of Requirement."

"Actually, yes. But another reason why we decided to go with potions instead of charms is so we could ensure nothing alive can be transported. And it won't transport anything unless both cloths are within a ten-foot radius."

Hermione fingered the two swaths of silky fabric and looked back up at Fred. "You don't look pleased."

"We did this out of curiosity," said Fred, "but George and I agreed this product is never going to see the light of day."

She nodded, handing him the two cloths. "Too many things that could go wrong regardless?"

"Indee—"

BOOM!

Because I guess the best way to move forward with one story is to stop working on it and start working on another. Whatever.